Mini Penny Blog

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

New York City and Comedy Central

As many of you know, last Wednesday was my first day of work at the UO home office. It's been pretty amazing so far. Well, on my first day I was informed that they were going to send me to New York for the Comedy Central Indecision party. And I had a big confession to make:

I had never been to New York City.

Everyone at work was baffled by this, and admittedly so was I. After all of the things I've done, I somehow had passed over NYC. Needless to say that I was really excited to get up and tweet/Instagram about the event.

So our day was already set up to be really long. We still went into the office in the morning and worked until around two, and afterwards we cabbed over to to 30th Station to catch the Amtrak. It only took a couple of hours to get to New York. It felt really good to be around big buildings again — something about all of it reminded me of Chicago. And with it being election day, most of us were at pretty high anxiety for hours.

When we were walking from Penn Station, Meg stopped me so that we could get a photo with the Empire State building in the background. Totally touristy and totally adorable! I can't believe how small it looked though!

We dropped our things off at the hotel, changed quickly, and then headed over to the NY Beer Company to meet up with the rest of our team, Comedy Central, and our contest winners. Everyone from Comedy Central was really nice and our two contest winners were hilarious! They were great company and we couldn't have asked for it to turn out better.

But it did in fact get better.

Angus showed up! He just happened to be in town for business and we were able to find each other really easily. The folks from Comedy Central were awesome and invited for him to come along with us to the party (his birthday was this past weekend) and of course I was so happy to get to hang out with one of my best friends all evening!

When we got to the party, we were given fun little scratch off cards! I got three Joe Bidens and was able to pick a prize, so I got some cute Indecision buttons for my desk at work. Angus had three Obamas and picked a really funny Obama candy dispenser. There was a lot of food and drinks and interesting photo sweeps.

We hopped into the photobooths and played with some fun props, too. I swear we went through this thing so many times!

Meg and I even decided to have a little election of our own. We somehow managed to show up dressed really similarly and posted our bow ties on the @urbanoutfitters Instagram for the followers to vote! The votes were close, but my bow tie won by just a little. This being the case, we agreed to work on our bow-tie-bipartisonship for a better neck-accessoried America!

My favorite part of the night was meeting everyone at the party. So many of the Comedy Central people were awesome, and meeting some party attendees here and there really took the anxiety off of my election thoughts. We met a couple of the guys from 30 Rock and John Lutz was an absolute delight! Check out me and Angus cheesin'!

When the Daily Show started live, we were all glued to the screens. Shortly after, I got a text from my mom saying that Obama had taken Ohio and I felt so much relief! I was so happy to see progress in my home state! As soon as they projected Obama as the winner of the election, the entire room exploded in cheers. It was such a relief after a long, long day!

Panorama: Click to Enlarge

So as we were leaving the party (late), we passed Times Square and there were loads of people out watching the live news on the jumbo screens. We decided to hang out and wait for Obama's speech — in the mean time we met Cookie Monster, an oboe player, a French news anchor, all sorts. As soon as Obama started his speech from Chicago, the whole crowd was a mix of tears, chanting, and happiness.

There were a lot of great firsts for the election yesterday that made me excited to be a part of the entire process. Being in NYC for this whirlwind trip was surreal and I can't believe that something so awesome (and that went so smoothly) was my first experience for NYC. Sometimes it's hard being the new girl, but I'm starting to settle in at work and Indecision was a really great ice breaker for me!

This morning we were up and on a train back to Philadelphia by 9am. We went straight from the station to work. I lots of work to get done today, so let's just say that there was a lot of coffee involved.